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Your new mobile Fotokite drone requires tethering

This article was taken from the August 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.

This is the convenient new way to live-stream street demo footage -- or even selfies: a quadrocopter with a mounted GoPro, on a lead. The 500g battery-powered Fotokite is simple: "You never have to touch it -- there are no joysticks, controls, radio or GPS," says Zurich-based roboticist Sergei Lupashin, 29. "It's all done through gestures, and it uses the vanilla-standard rate gyroscope and accelerometers in your smartphone." When airborne, it measures the force produced by the tense tether and calculates its angle relative to the user. It's being trialled by the BBC's R&D team to record events from overhead, and has been used by archaeologists to overfly a Roman ruin in Vienna.

Lupashin spent five years at ETH Zurich University, building the Flying Machine Arena -- a space devoted to perfecting autonomous flight using drones. "It was a very controlled environment with sensors and high-tech cameras, but I wanted to build something anyone could use," he says. Last February he founded Perspective Robotics to produce the device commercially. And although the Fotokite was demonstrated successfully at TEDGlobal last year, Lupashin is not ready to put a sale date on it just yet. "The Fotokite has an unforgiving failure mode -- if it breaks, it falls out of the sky. We are going to spend time building intelligent systems that can prevent this from happening."

This article was first published in the August 2014 issue of WIRED magazine